A Little Travel Miracle

So.... I don't think I can ever travel in economy class on an international flight again ... because first class was AMAZING!! Somehow, a little miracle occurred and I got bumped to first class for my longest flight - from Seoul, South Korea to Los Angeles (that was 11 hours)! It was really crazy to walk into the plane, show the flight attendant my ticket, and have her say, "Upstairs please." I was thinking, "Is there economy seating upstairs?!" Nope! There wasn't. Just first class. I sat on the edge of my seat for a while expecting another flight attendant to come tell me that there had been a mistake. But no one came. And so I took full advantage of that awesome first class seat - I reclined it back until I was flat and slept soundly, without any drugs to help, for half of the flight (as I planned).

The Great Wall of China

The Wall in China truly is Great. The day we visited the Great Wall of China was . . . magical. It was a three-hour drive to the wall, but well worth it. We hiked and explored and took pictures for hours. We awed at how the wall continued to follow the ridge line of the mountains well beyond our eyesight into the clouds.

The Forbidden City & Houtong

When it comes to the Forbidden City, the pictures pretty much say it all. But there are a couple things I'll add.

When we were in Tiananmen Square, there were a bunch of darling little girls in pink that came up to me and Catherine and asked to take their pictures with us. So we obliged and I asked our tour guide to take pictures too - to document all these celebrity photos shoots we've been subject to. Ha!

panaramic of Tiananmen Square 

the cute girls (and one boy) who wanted a picture with us

Tthe Forbidden City - it is huge! We kept going into huge courtyard after huge courtyard. I thought it would never end. Most of the big temple looking parts of the city were rarely used! Only like once a year. It was kind of rainy that day, but the temperature was so much cooler and therefore nicer. Unfortunately, we couldn't go into any of the buildings. We had to stay outside. But there were a few buildings where the doors were open or there were windows to peer in, but it was such a mess to jam your way through bodies to even get a glimpse of what was inside. I had more success by raising my camera way up over my head and taking a picture of what was inside and then looking at the picture on my camera of what was inside.

Now I'll let the pictures do the talking. (But keep reading, cuz I have more after the pictures.)

this is the throne where the last Empress Cixi sat behind her 6-year-old Emperor son on the bed behind the curtain. He sat on the throne, she was on the bed with the curtain drawn. 

After the Forbidden City, we went on a rickshaw tour of the old neighborhoods of Beijing that are called houtong. We even stopped at one home to have lunch made by a native Beijing family and they talked about living in these old homes. Her grandfather bought the home over 100 years ago, but the government owns the land and will be tearing down the houtongs soon to build more modern buildings. The houtong homes don't have bathrooms! They only have community bathrooms every other block or so. The main hostess was a painter - she painted the inside of tiny little snuff bottles that the Chinese use to sniff smelly dried herbs and plants. Here are some  pics from that adventure:

our tour guide on the left is translating for our hostess who is sitting in the middle

our hostess showing us how she paints the snuff bottles

our rickshaw guides taking a nap during our lunch

And we also went to the Drum Tower where they performed this for us:

Beijing

In this post, I'll write about everything Beijing except the Forbidden City and the Great Wall of China. Those two things must have their own post since they were so amazing!!

The day we flew into Beijing we went directly to the Summer Palace. Since it is a palace you can guess that the emperor came here - and they did! During the hot summer months. The lake is manmade and the dirt that they dug out to make the lake? Yeah, it went to make the hill that the palace is built on. We mostly just walked around the grounds, which were packed with tourists! And here we had some more photo shoots where some Chinese tourists wanted their pictures taken with some white westerners. Ha!

Friday was the Forbidden City and Saturday was the Great Wall of China.

Sunday, we went to church. Although I only went for an hour because I ended up getting so sick! With a cold. Church was in an office building where they rent space. They had the full three-hour block and the two Beijing branches were combined since apparently a lot of people leave for the summer. So it started at 8:30 am. Again, this branch's members were only foreign passport holders since Chinese Nationals who are members of the church cannot go to church meetings ... at all. After church, I went back to the hotel to crash and lay in bed all day.

On Monday we had a fascinating meeting with the US Embassy and a few of their personnel. We set up the appointment through one embassy employee who is a member of the church and he invited three other employees to come visit with us. We were there for one and a half hours. Here is a recap of some of the stuff that we learned on our visit:

• The Chinese military helps to "guard" the perimeter of the embassy. The embassy employees kind of laughed at that and said the Chinese military is there to watch what goes on at the embassy. 
• The embassy actually employs a lot of Chinese citizens to do some of the menial jobs (like custodial and grounds and maybe a few other clerical jobs) and the employees said those Chinese citizens are invited to a "tea time" with Chinese government officials on occasion. The employees think that is a time when the Chinese government interviews the Chinese embassy employees to see what information they can get out of them about the US. 
• The embassy employees live only a few blocks away from the embassy and they say there are hundreds of cameras along the streets that take pictures of them as they walk to and from the embassy. 
• The US Embassy once got in trouble from the Chinese government for publishing the air quality index to embassy employees because it gave Beijing such a bad reputation. (The pollution in Beijing is terrible - it was hazy nearly every day and every hour of every day that we were there and the tour guide told us that it was mist from the rain and clouds .... uh-huh.) 
• One of the conditions under which a church can become legalized in China is that they must allow the Chinese government to have a say in who its leaders are. Can you imagine how that might go over with the LDS Church? And the Chinese government is suspicious of religion because they see it as a way for the people to organize and rise up against the government. 
• One embassy employee said he helps with China's relationships with other Asian countries. For instance, he's involved (in some fashion that I'm not clear on) with talks between China and Japan over who has territory rights for a set of islands. 
• Another embassy employee said he helps with the relationship between China, North Korea, and the US. And he told us about a parade that North Korea just had and how anti-American it was, while a Chinese diplomat was there just watching. I guess the embassy was a little bugged that the Chinese diplomat was a spectator and didn't say anything to North Korea when we have a pretty good relationship with China right now. 
• The embassy employee who is the member of the church, told us about his work with the Department of Justice there at the embassy. He provides consultation to the Chinese legal system on prosecuting Chinese citizens and maintaining their rights as human beings. I think he also said something about how China won't extradite anyone to the US so consequently we won't extradite anyone to China... but I could be mistaken on that. 

After the embassy visit we made some quick visits to the Temple of Heaven due to the rain.

And then we went shopping at the famous Hongqiao Pearl Market - where they sell a ton of stuff, not just pearls. I talked a shop-owner down from 850 Chinese yuan to 110 yuan for a purse. Yeah, you bargain for everything in China.

I was still sick on Tuesday so I hung out at the hotel again, until that night when we went to the Olympic Park where they held the Summer Olympics in 2008.

those are kites!